He pioneered the use of surgical staples, the treatment of chest wall deformities, and non-operative management of intussusception.
He attended the University of Oklahoma, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and graduated with a degree in zoology in 1930.
[1] During the Second World War he served as an army major directing a team of surgeons at the 56th General Hospital in France.
After visiting the Soviet Union in 1958 and noticing their surgeons' use of fairly crude staplers surgical staples as a time-saving replacement for suturing by hand, Ravitch and Félicien M. Steichen spent several years designing and testing surgical staplers for use in the United States; their design reached the market in 1967 and would eventually become ubiquitous in operating rooms.
[3] He is regarded as one of the founders of the subspecialty of pediatric surgery, and he and Félicien Steichen are credited with introducing surgical staples to the United States.